Digital marketing skills are of immense value – whether you are already working in an agency or waiting to land your dream job in one. However, most people believe that these digital marketing skills can be acquired on the job, or through watching YouTube videos.
While we can’t deny the fact that videos can give you a lot of information, you need to actually immerse yourself in the digital marketing world & learn the requisite digital marketing skills from the right leaders and mentors. Opting for a professional digital marketing course would help you gain the required knowledge and could give you a good kick start to your career in digital marketing.
Though a career in digital marketing is lucrative, it is a huge industry, hence it becomes difficult for newcomers to plan their route and discover their niche. Before getting into this field one must understand what are digital marketing skills.
In this post, we’re going to cover five digital marketing skills that are crucial for success in today’s landscape—whether you’re looking to grow your career or business or both. Plus, we’ll provide a free tool so you can assess, improve, or practice that skill, as well as a free course to help you ensure you’re building these skills on a solid foundation.
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Copywriting
Copy is written material aimed at promoting and prompting action. Given the number of online channels that exist today, copywriting is a must-have digital marketing skill. Emails, landing pages, event invitations, paid ads, social media posts, chat bots, product descriptions—these all require copy.
Copywriting is a different skill from other writing (blog writing or technical writing, for example) because you need to be able to capture attention, communicate value, and inspire action with a limited number of words and space. You also need to be able to shift gears easily, as the expectations and mindset of an audience varies depending on platform.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to all levels of digital marketing and anyone going into the field must have a basic handle on it. You can certainly leave the highly technical, back-end stuff to the more technical people on the team, but knowing how SEO really works and a solid understanding of best practices and content optimization are crucial for running a successful digital marketing campaign.
Both SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) inform your entire digital strategy on a data and content level. So you need to be able to communicate to other teammates about this and won’t get far without learning the basics and understanding how SEO and SEM can work together.
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Content Marketing
Content is at the core of digital marketing and content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. But content marketing is a huge job in itself. You have to be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for many channels and understand how to create an effective content strategy to engage and convert audiences.
And to make things a little more challenging, it’s important to note that content can take many forms, from video to social, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, whitepapers…the list goes on. You also have to have a firm grasp of social media marketing as content is crucial on social platforms. Get some inspiration from six global brands that know how to do content marketing successfully.
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Data Analytics
No matter what facet of digital marketing you go into, analytics will be central to your strategy and help you make better data-driven decisions for campaigns. Monitoring and reporting via tools such as Google Analytics is pretty straightforward, but the tricky part is how to gather and use that information to learn more about consumer behavior and apply it to solutions that boost traffic and conversions.
Most businesses (even small ones) have huge amounts of data to track, and great digital marketers need to understand how to gather and use this to their advantage. Companies will always be on the lookout for people who not only know how to “read” data using their marketing technical skills but to extract value from customer data to improve future strategies. If you can show that you can do this in innovative ways that result in campaign success, you will be a valuable asset in the industry.
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Video Production and Marketing
Video production and marketing have quickly become the central focus of every marketing strategy. Every business pushes video content as they grab the attention of the users quickly.
With the audience quickly moving to smartphones in today’s world, the youth of today engages with video content more than ever. It is not only a medium of entertainment anymore but a powerful tool for promotion and lead generation, especially on social media platforms.
The introduction of applications like TikTok and features like Instagram reels has changed the way video content is perceived. A study from Hubspot shows that 50% of consumers want video content from their brands rather than any other content. Thus, video production and marketing have become one of the top digital marketing skills of the decade.